So I’ve been away for awhile on the blog but not in real financial life. I’ve been looking at, putting offers on, backing away from, and purchasing a house. It’s been crazy, to say the least.
I started this blog because we didn’t know where to live. One of us works in the city and the other does not. One of us likes the countryside and wants to live there forever, the other one is fine with (dare I say is happy with) living in the suburbs and or the city. One of us likes doing home repair projects, the other does not. I will leave it to you to correlate which features go with which actor in this narrative.
So we have been househunting. And we found something that seemed to minimize the costs, maximize the gentrification and upside potential, and was also cute! Then we got back the survey or property assessment and found out that it not only needed a little bit of work but it actually needed a lot of work. As my spouse commutes on a train for 3 hours a day, this meant that I had to be mostly (and mainly) responsible for doing all of that work, maybe with his help on the weekends. And we needed cash to do it. And we don’t have the cold hard cash to take on a project of such a size and with so much disruption. So we pulled out.
Which means that only two days later, after seeing a 37 square meter apartment in London listed for 410K pounds (a closet by any stretch of the imagination), we decided to take the middle road: the already finished fancy house at the top end of our budget in the suburbs rather than either the tiny London apartment or the fixer-upper. It’s move in ready and I feel terribly guilty for making this decision. My partner said he felt like it was the closest thing to something spiritual happening. Saying goodbye to one house and the next day, another more perfect house arriving.
Rather than spiritual, the words that I am feeling include opulent, ostentatious, and irresponsible. Some people try to tame these feelings with other things like, “I’ve worked hard” or “I deserve this.” But mostly, I feel like I got lucky and I’m about to make a financial leap of faith and I hope it’s not a terrible one.
I had a plan that once we moved into the cheaper fixer-upper, I would change this blog to include all the photos of me being frugal and fixing the house, but that is not going to happen because I am moving into my dream house and it’s already more or less done. I feel terrible about it and excited at the same time. I hope some day it matches my goals for intentional living. At the moment, I’m very uncomfortable. I will try to keep on writing about it.
